States weigh costs of evacuees

Federal reimbursement expected; details unknown

Federal reimbursement expected; details unknown

January 02, 2006|STEPHANIE SIMON Los Angeles Times

Overtime for workers processing a deluge of food-stamp applications. A satellite dish to bring Internet access to a summer-camp-turned-shelter. New textbooks and teachers. Dialysis. Chemotherapy. Security deposits for rented apartments. As they begin planning budgets for 2006, officials in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere are first calculating the costs of providing for hundreds of thousands of evacuees displaced by Hurricane Katrina. They've come up with some daunting numbers -- and unanswered questions. While they expect reimbursement from the federal government for many expenses, officials say they don't know how much they will receive or when it might arrive. More vexing for budget planners is uncertainty about the evacuees: How many will stay in their adoptive states, how many will find work and become self-sufficient, how many will continue to need public aid -- and for how long. Georgia legislators recently warned that medical and education costs could spike by $100 million next fiscal year if the 44,000 evacuees now living in the state decide to stay. In Texas, officials predict the evacuee population of 400,000 could cost the state as much as $550 million next year. They're hoping the federal government will step up reimbursement. "We're not being mercenary about this, but we want to bring it to the attention of Congress and the administration," said Steven McCraw, director of homeland security for Texas Gov. Rick Perry. "We want to provide first-class care to our neighbors. On the other hand, we don't want to be disproportionately penalized because we opened our arms ... " "We never envisioned, nor had we planned on, taking nearly half a million people into our state virtually overnight," McCraw said. Even states that have taken in fewer Katrina survivors face challenges, especially with ongoing health care needs. In Nebraska, for instance, the lead agency helping 166 evacuees airlifted from New Orleans to Omaha spent $200,000 within a few months to help them settle them in motels and take care of urgent medical problems, from snakebites to depression. FEMA will cover much of those expenditures. But FEMA will not cover the types of calls Beverly Griffith still receives daily -- from evacuees who don't qualify for state Medicaid insurance but need a cab ride to a doctor's appointment, or pain pills for an aching back, or an X-ray on a swollen arm. Her agency, the Eastern Nebraska Office on Aging, has nearly drained its reserve fund; Griffith is not sure what she'll do when it's gone, except keep helping as best she can. The federal government has agreed to pay five months of Medicaid insurance for evacuees in several hard-hit states. The federal treasury will also cover at least several months -- and possibly up to a full year -- of educational costs associated with Katrina evacuees. Many who stay beyond that point will presumably settle into their new states as productive citizens, paying at least as much in taxes as they take in services. But some analysts warn that the new host states can expect swelling social-service caseloads. "I think it's almost guaranteed that those who stay will be the those with the least economic opportunity ... the people who don't have anyplace else to go," said Barton Smith, director of the Institute for Regional Forecasting at the University of Houston. If, as he expects, the disabled, elderly and impoverished stay in disproportionate numbers, "it will likely put a net burden on the Houston economy for several years to come," Smith said.